


The Old Duke

by Ardatli



Series: The Dale Cycle [8]
Category: Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Crusaders!AU, Fourth Crusade, Gen, Heather Dale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 15:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8452297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardatli/pseuds/Ardatli
Summary: So every passing year reservesFamiliar rhythms and the newAnd through it all I lead and serveWith joy as I was born to do.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is **part eight** of a multi-story cycle, set in and around the Fourth Crusade (1201 - 1204 CE). Many of the parts can be read alone, but this one works best if read in conjunction with Lady of the Lake, which happens parallel to this. (Kate/Tommy, explicit.) 
> 
> Each story in this cycle is inspired by (some more loosely than others) a particular song from the incomparable Canadian folk singer/songwriter Heather Dale. 
> 
> This is a medieval AU, and has been researched-within-reason. That is to say, I know quite a bit about the middle ages and the Crusades, I’ve done the reading on the basics of this particular Crusade and figured out how to fit these guys in, and hopefully the environment will ring true. Some events and people have been tweaked in order to make this AU work, but many of the details are drawn from real history. OTOH, if you think you recognize a Marvel cameo, you probably did. 
> 
> The Old Duke is inspired by the song of the same name, by Heather Dale.  
> https://youtu.be/CL31CJ6mCOk?t=18s

**The Old Duke**  


_So every passing year reserves_  
_Familiar rhythms and the new_  
_And through it all I lead and serve_  
_With joy as I was born to do._

**June 2** **4** **, 1203. Scutari (Chrysopolis), Byzantium**

Elijah, Strategus of Scutari, third of his family to bear the title, governor in the name of Alexios Angelos the Emperor of the Romans, the hand of justice, was a man undone by love. That thought was nothing new—he’d been the butt of jokes for years because of it, whispers in the corners and murmurs in the antechambers when his courtiers and guards thought no-one was near.

 _She will be the end of the line of dukes_ , the whispers said. _Witchcraft keeps him spellbound,_ went the others. One of those things was looking ever more possible as the years went on, the second he would never believe. That he should have sent Katherine back to her father years ago was the only consistent refrain, but those words held no power over him.

Not even now, when he stood at the window of the palace and watched her urge her horse into a wild gallop, desperate to be free of this place—he couldn’t bear the idea of seeing her vanish over the horizon for what would be the final time.

“She shouldn’t be riding out alone like that, not with the Venetians making landfall.” He didn’t jump at the sound of the familiar voice behind him. Nathaniel stepped forward and joined him at the window, bracing his arm on the sill of the window. Eli’s second was half-armoured already, bracers gleaming in the afternoon sun and his brown hair caught back by a narrow silver fillet. His brow furrowed in a dark frown as he stared out the window at the green and rolling hills. “Chalcedon’s not far enough. The coast will be filled with them by sunrise, them and their damned footsoldiers.”

“I tried telling her to stay here,” Eli replied, not bothering to hide the frustration colouring his voice. “But you know how she can be. Stubborn, and irrational, and completely unwilling to listen to reason.”

Nate’s glare at Eli then was just as familiar, and equally as irritating. The upstart knight had the terrible habit of contradicting Eli, giving him orders and acting, at times, as though he were the governor and Eli the general. He hadn’t gone so far as to be subordinate in front of anyone else, or Eli would have been well within his rights to get rid of him, but being ordered around in private was only a moderate improvement. “I’ll go and bring her back.”

“No,” Eli countered him immediately. “She won’t come back with you, not easily, and that will cause more problems. The last thing we need now is more reason for the court to plot against _my wife_. Because you know the first thing that will be said.”

Nate’s answer was less than sympathetic. “If she doesn’t want people muttering about her behaviour, then she should try behaving.”

“You might as well try asking the moon and the tides to halt in their tracks. You’ll have about as much success.” Eli turned away from the window, rubbing his hands over the short-cropped curls covering his head. The heat of the day pressed in on him, the long tunic shielding him from the worst of the sun. Soon, too soon, it would be time to find his squire, sharpen his sword and face the Crusaders on the field. Their ships had foundered in a storm on the Aegaen sea, fine, but that wasn’t going to lower their numbers by anything approaching significant.

Not that Kate had ever cared about that sort of thing. She’d come to him out of a storm that first time, too, bringing the thunder and the lightning in her eyes. He’d only been on the throne a handful of months, his uncle’s disappearance pushing him into rule long before he’d ever imagined he’d have to take up the banner. But Josiah had walked off one day. Thrown himself into the waves, some said—riding to the mountains, others argued—and no-one had seen him since.

“Is there any chance at all that she’s in league with them? Her father _is_ one of the Pope’s men.”

Eli turned on Nate with anger burning up his tongue. “Are you out of your mind? Kate is loyal. She would never!”

“If she’s loyal, then why is she leaving?” He cocked his head, the insolent bastard, and Eli’s fists clenched at his sides. Something flashed in Nate’s eyes—a challenge, a warning?

A test.

Eli took a deep breath and settled the turmoil inside himself. “If she was about to betray us, do you think she’d be that obvious about it?” He narrowed his eyes. “I know my wife, Nathaniel. She may be a daughter of Rome, but she has committed herself to the Eastern Empire. And to me.”

Eli had needed help, back then. Someone to stand at his side and make sure his decisions were sound. He’d found that first in Nate, in the knight who knew his weapons better than any man around, whose strategic mind worked ten steps ahead of anyone Eli had ever met.

And when the proposal had come from the Bishop in Firenze, the offer of his bastard daughter’s hand in exchange for security and trading rights, Eli had grasped on to the opportunity with both hands.

Nate had called Eli an imbecile then, to spend his energy on negotiating for a bride when there was so much other work to be done, but all Eli had seen was the chance to have another ally in his corner. Someone who would stand behind him for the rest of their lives, not vanish into the night and leave him to bear the weight of a crown too heavy, too soon.

Katerina—Kate—had not been at all what he’d expected. She’d disembarked arrayed in damask and silk, her black hair flowing out behind her and the golden sun shining down to bless her with an angel’s halo.

Eli had fallen in love before he had even heard her speak.

The feeling had not been mutual.

She had married him anyway, and had smiled at him as though it was more than duty that bound her to her word. And he’d taken that smile and held on to it as a promise. Surely over the eight years that had followed she had grown to love him. She said she did, and that was enough.

They were perfectly matched in so many things, in ambition and passion, in discussions of strategy and politics. They ended up toe to toe too many times, their voices raised and tempers high, only to end each bout with a new, better, stronger answer than either could have come up with alone.

She still came to his room at night, when the darkness slipped silken across their skins and made room for honesty. But her eyes smiled at him less and less with each passing month.

And now she was riding across the plains, searching for something that he couldn’t begin to understand, with her countrymen landing on the southern shores.

“Follow her,” he said finally, dropping his hands from where he’d clasped them behind his neck. “Follow her, but keep your distance. She’ll come back when she’s ready. Don’t let her see you under any circumstances except the most dire.”

She might not care about her own life, but he’d be damned if he was going to let one of those western bastards get within sword’s reach of _his_ wife. Not without having the man’s blood water the fields in return.

“Finally, you see sense,” Nate grumbled, but he bowed and headed for the stairs. He clattered down the stone steps, the sound of his booted feet growing softer and more distant.

Silence filled the tower room after he was gone, the mosaics in the ceilings and the silk drapes on the walls still and heavy. Eli could hear the voices, then, the ones that murmured in his ear in the dead of the night. _You’re not good enough; you will never be the leader your grandfather was; the weak link in the chain-_

“Enough!” Eli growled at the room. He turned and strode down the stairs, his cloak swirling behind him. He had too many things to do; he didn’t have time to listen to the doubts that spoke in his people’s voices.

The voices didn’t follow, but others echoed up ahead of him as he strode through the palace toward the great hall.

“I say give them passage. What does it matter if some western oafs make camp for a few days?”

“Because it won’t be making camp. They’ll raid the villages, burn the farms—they’re like locusts when they swarm across the countryside. They need to be repelled before they make landfall or they’ll destroy everything that stands in their way.”

“It’s too late for that. The runner came from Chalcedon this morning.”

The cluster of knights and lords broke apart from their huddled group when Eli entered the room, most bowing deep at the Strategus’ entrance. Stephanos Laskaris, tall and bearded, his hair streaked with white, stepped forward. “We would have your words, Strategus. The Pope’s army approaches, and yet we do not muster. Why?”

“Constantinople hasn’t called for aid, for one thing,” Eli replied, his mind racing through his options and the problems each answer would create. Damn it all, where was Kate? She was skilled at the quick words to buy him time. “The garrison there is well-manned and well-armed—”

“Not the way it used to be,” Antonius insisted, stabbing his finger at the pair of them. A fighter, not a sage, his scarred face and broad shoulders spoke of a lifetime spent in armour, with the disposition to match. “Constantinople is underpowered and defenceless. We should be rallying under Alexios’ banner, not sitting here while the walls tremble!”

“And what is to be gained by rushing in?”

“Preserving the city!”

“By abandoning our own?” Eli interrupted the argument before it could become full-blown sedition, his jaw set and heart pounding. “I’ve seen nothing so far that requires us to pull back from Scutari, and make no mistake—sending troops to Constantinople will mean exactly that. Chalcedon will not fall. But if by chance any of the Pope’s men make it this far, they will meet resistance here.” He hadn’t intended to make the choice, not like this, without enough information. But the words spilled out of him before he could halt himself.

Stephanos nodded, and his approval made everything all right.

It didn’t last.

The growl of dissent came from the back of the group. “What does he know? He is only a _boy._ ”

The red heat pulsed in Eli’s vision, the blood thundering in his ears. There was no denying the words were meant to be an insult, as foul and as hurtful as they came. At five-and-twenty, Eli had not been a child for a very long time. “Step forward, Vittore, and say that to my face!” He spat back, his hands balling into fists before he could form coherent thought.

The group parted like the waves of the ocean before God, men falling back in their places until a path opened clear between Elijah and Vittore. His grandfather’s consul bore the scars of a hundred battles, had been to Isaiah as Nathaniel was to Eli, but the sneer upon his lip now, the crinkles in his hard-battered face, showed how little of the respect for the grandfather he carried over to the grandson.

“You,” he said slowly and clearly, “are a child, in a man’s world. You are hiding in fear when we should be riding out to conquer.”

A ripple and murmur went through the crowd, larger now by far than the small cluster of knights who had been there when Eli first entered the great hall. His court was assembled, others slipping in the broad arched doors, and it was here that Eli would have to make his stand.

_Where are you when I need you, Kate?_

“And you are a foolish old man who lives only for the reminder that he was once powerful,” Eli shot back, hitting the same way that Vittore had shown him.

“What would you have me do, Vittore? Ride to Constantinople and leave the women and children here undefended? Abandon our chapels and treasuries to be looted by the western pigs? I have no intention of giving them the barest inch of quarter. We fortify here.” He was halfway across the room toward Vittore without making the decision to move, and he closed the final space between them with a few long strides. “Don’t think for a moment that I’m weak.”

Vittore looked down on him from his extra head’s worth of height, and his sneer did not abate. “Your line is dead, Strategus, and you are nothing but a boy pretending to be half the man his grandfather was.”

There were many other strategic responses which did not involve punching his grandfather’s most trusted advisor in the face, but when Eli was backed into a corner, his instinct was all he had. His fist crunched against bone, flesh giving way beneath his knuckles and the sound reverberating through the room, through his mind, and back and forth through time itself.

_Your line is dead._

_Nothing but a boy._

_Is there any chance at all that she’s in league with them?_

Even through the burning anger-haze and the sick heaviness in his stomach, Eli could hear the words, feel the truth in them. Burn them on his skin and let the world see: he was a fraud and a failure, a boy pretending to be a man, a lord with no heir and a king with no court.

But he could still fight, with his fists and his feet, with a sword if someone would hand him one! He may be a great pretender to the rule, but he would not—could not, for Katherine’s sake and for all of those who had once believed in him—he dared not cower. They would all be lost.

Vittore returned his punch, swinging wildly through the blood that flowed over his eyes. Eli ducked away, the fist screaming past his face. Another punch, less sure now without the element of surprise, his fist glancing off the bloodied mess of Vittore’s cheekbone.

Time slowed.

Screams behind him, a roar of blood in his ears that resolved into voices.

Hands grabbed at Vittore’s arms and pulled him back.

Eli shook off those who tried to hold him down.

“Strategus! Strategus!” Stephanos’ voice in his ear, a call back to sense, but Vittore was wiping blood from his mouth with the back of one jewelled sleeve.

“A messenger. A messenger comes from Chalcedon.”

Eli shook Stephanos’ wrinkled hand off his arm, and tugged his own tunic back into place. He glared heated daggers at Vittore, whose chin wavered, faltered. He dropped his eyes rather than hold Eli’s gaze. Only then did Eli turn away.

A woman stood in the doorway, black curls bound back beneath a coif of chain maille. Her armour was splashed with mud and something redder still, the star-pointed seal of the Emperor’s elite guard pressed into the metal above her heart.

Her dark skin ran pale and bloodless beneath, circles beneath her eyes betraying her exhaustion. Yet she stood tall and firm, her booted feet planted on the flagstones of the hall.

“I come with a message for the Strategus,” she said firmly. Her eyes bore into him as though she had seen everything he had said and done that day, borne witness to the disarray and the self-doubt, the voices that dogged his every move. “Chalcedon has repelled the first attack, but it will not last.

“The Crusaders have a sorcerer among their ranks, and he calls lightning to the battlefield. Eighty of their knights defeated a cavalry rank of five hundred. Fortify the walls, Strategus.

“Skutari must hold.”


End file.
